Which is why there was a counter-culture belief that Jesus was preaching about a higher god than the one in the Torah. The one in the Torah was thought to be basically a spaz who couldn’t do creation correctly and the god of Jesus was more powerful and intelligent. All those texts were destroyed when the Roman church got power.
Just in case you didn’t know, there was a big cache of gnostic texts found in Nag Hammadi but the discovery got overshadowed by the dead sea scrolls. They were very cool to look into and shed a lot of light on pre-romanized Christianity.
Yes, I read The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagel last year. It wasn’t as good as The Origin of Satan, also Pagel (and how I found her). I just finished an excellent book on the historicity of Jesus that had a lot of info on the Gnostics.
Which is why there was a counter-culture belief that Jesus was preaching about a higher god than the one in the Torah. The one in the Torah was thought to be basically a spaz who couldn’t do creation correctly and the god of Jesus was more powerful and intelligent. All those texts were destroyed when the Roman church got power.
Just in case you didn’t know, there was a big cache of gnostic texts found in Nag Hammadi but the discovery got overshadowed by the dead sea scrolls. They were very cool to look into and shed a lot of light on pre-romanized Christianity.
Yes, I read The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagel last year. It wasn’t as good as The Origin of Satan, also Pagel (and how I found her). I just finished an excellent book on the historicity of Jesus that had a lot of info on the Gnostics.
I’ll check those out! I find the subject super interesting.